Theories of Work Group and Team



Theories of Work Group and Team

Introduction

Work groups are the basic building blocks of an organization. Groups contribute to organizational effectiveness when group goals are aligned with organizational goals, team is a specific type of groups. In most organizations today formal groups may consist of employees who are responsible for an identifiable work process, a specific project, or a problem that need solving, often called "team" (1). Team has the potential to dramatically affect an organization's performance.

Theories of Work Group and Team

In recent years, teams have emerged as the most important group phenomenon in organizations. The term "team" is not new to organizations, and teamwork has been stressed throughout the year. Today, teams are becoming increasingly popular, so how to improve and enhance the performance of the teams in organizations is an important topic to organizations. Moreover, many organizations have successful used teams in working; let's illustrate some effectiveness and ineffectiveness of teams in organizations.

Nowadays, many organizations have succeeded using team, but still a part of them have not effective used team. Let's illustrate three companies use teams in working. Our Group work is a good example of the use of effective teams (refer to Appendix 3). HP has been known as a leader in high technology equipment. HP has fostered a team-based, participate culture throughout its history, oriented primarily around its culture of high performance. Let's study how it uses an effective team in its distribution process. We decided to use a team to reorganize the distribution on process and reduce delivery time. Two Our Group work managers who assumed responsibility for the project assembled a team of thirty-five people for Our Group work and two others firms and began examine the work flow. First, they looked at the ways things were being done currently and began noting ways of eliminating work steps and shortening the process. Next, the team completed a two-week training and orientation program to familiarize team members with the current process. Then the team redesigned the entire work process and got everyone on the cross-functional team to buy in. finally, they implemented the process and then made changes to correct errors remaining in the system. In the process, they were allowed to empower the work force and managed to get delivery time down to eight days. This enabled the we to cut its inventories by nearly 20 percent while increasing service levels to customers.

Another example of using effective team is provided by Eastman Kodak Corporation (refer to Appendix 4). In 1989, the traditional manufacturing functional approach in the black-and-white operation was changed to a team-flow process. They used cross-functional team responsible for streams. The results were amazing. By 1992, the Zebra group was 10 percent under the cost budget, rather than over; response time was down to twenty days.

Digital Equipment Corporation based in Maynard, and one of the largest computer makers in the United States. Recently disbanded a good numbers of its cross-functional team because the teams spent so much time ...